Idaho Death Row Inmate's Execution Called Off

BOISE, ID — Gerald Pizzuto will not receive a lethal injection on June 2 as scheduled as his attorneys have requested and been granted a commutation hearing by the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole.

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Pizzuto has been on death row since his involvement in a 1985 double murder. He has now been diagnosed with terminal cancer and his hearing before the commission will not take place until November.

In Pizzuto's request for commutation, his legal team is requesting the commission take into account the inmate's childhood.

According to his siblings, when Pizzuto was a child, his stepfather would frequently wake him up with a flashlight and hunting knife, take him to a garage, string him up with extension cords, rape him and charge other adult men up to $20 to rape him as well. The stepfather beat Pizzuto with a cattle prod, horse crop and 2x4, leaving him with brain damage.

"You could be asleep in your bed and be yanked out by your hair in the middle of the night and drug off," his sister, Elsie Pizzuto, told a defense investigator.

This all began when Pizzuto was 5 or 6 years old, and his mother, according to the other children, did not protect him from the abuse. If anyone began looking into the abuse, the stepfather would uproot the family, even changing their last names to evade law enforcement.

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